Repeated Exposure to Teaching for Long-Term Learning

Max Bell, the leading force behind the first edition of Everyday Mathematics, has said that if you give children an opportunity to forget something, they will. Everyday Mathematics is carefully structured so that children are not given the opportunity to forget!

In this approach, sometimes called a “spiral,” a topic is revisited repeatedly in different ways, in increasing depth, and using different examples and contexts.

Important concepts and skills are purposefully revisited in a single grade and often across multiple grades.

But “spiraling” does not mean mastery is not important: Every grade of Everyday Mathematics includes specific Grade-Level Goals that precisely describe content to be mastered in that grade. These goals are carefully articulated so that skills and concepts develop coherently at each successive grade level.

Learning, in effect, “snowballs” over time. Through repeated exposures over time, concepts and skills become embedded in the child’s long-term memory.